Metadata Maps Reveals Rich People Prefer iPhones OVER Androids

Submitted by simon, on June 20th, 2013

These Maps Prove That Rich People Love iPhones

Among other things, cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5 (and even more money to keep up with the latest models that come out faster than plan upgrades do). Consider, then, this map of Washington, D.C., which uses geolocated tweets, and the cell phone metadata attached to them, to illustrate who in town is using iPhones (red dots) and who’s using Androids (green dots):

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guruEric Fischer.* They’ve converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

A new Pew study says the majority of Americans now own smartphones and the majority of rich, educated adults own iPhones.

Smartphone use is on the rise and has surpassed feature phone use, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project said in a June 5 report.

According to Pew data, 61 percent of cell phone owners either said that their phone is a smartphone or that it runs a smartphone platform. Given that 91 percent of the adult U.S. population now has some kind of cell phone, that puts the American adult smartphone-toting populace at 56 percent, as of May.